Guys, I have brilliant and exciting news!

I am turning this entire would-have-been polished-and-professional space into a giant playground. Complete with a ball pit and tire swing.

There’s a story here, of course. (There’s always a story. Stories are What I Do.)

See, once upon a time, I decided to forsake my nebulous ideal of perfection in lieu of being the best me I possibly could. I decided to embrace my quirks, weaknesses, and strengths – instead of denying or overriding them, to work with them and to make them work for me. I was really tired of trying to be something I wasn’t.

And this is the homecoming of that decision. I realized that my idea of a “good author” – or at least the public face of a good author – did not mesh with who and what I was, what I liked, what I wanted to and could do. So I’m tossing my not-me ideals out the window and refocusing on just being me.

I’m a writer. I don’t have to be not-me to be an author. That doesn’t make any sense.

I’m getting rid of all the stiff-and-forced professionalism. (Okay, not that there was that much of it anyways, but still.) I’m getting rid of a “posting schedule” and letting myself shrug off the pressure of deadlines. I’m getting rid of the feeling that this place is far too special to sully with my randomness and my less-than-bestness.

And now this is my playground. I get to do whatever I want here. I get to geek out and get excited about worldbuilding. I get to discover Important Life Things and share them. I get to inundate you all with my favorite fiction snips. I get to tell silly stories about my life, like the time my mom asked me if I was going to have a “wicker wedding” and my sister suggested I burn baskets at the four corners.

Ultimately, I get to be me. And that’s a lot of fun.

If any publishing agents or otherwise official people read this post, I may be doomed. But landing a publishing deal is not my goal. Telling stories is my goal. Living stories is my goal.

And I can do that just fine.

Image Credit: Crestock Creative Photos.

So I revived it, both on Twitter with @15minfic and on my website with a forum, where you can login with a variety of pre-existing IDs, including Twitter, Google, and Facebook.

I’ll be posting a prompt just about every day, and folks are strongly encouraged to post their ficlets in response to the thread, for ease of sharing and enjoying. Feel free to wander on over and contribute, or just hang out! (There is a coffeeshop on the forum. )

But this blog began as a writing blog. I am a writer, a creatrix– I like that it sounds like creature as much as creator– and I wanted to write about writing. I wanted to chronicle my walk down the path towards eventual publication, be it self-publishing or finding a brilliant agent willing to vouch for my work.

Yeah, that didn’t go so well. My jack-of-all-trades tendencies and spidermind (a kinder term for ADD) get in the way of any tunnel-vision I might try to obtain. I am not just a writer.

I’m also a martial artist. I’m a biker. I’m a geofictionist. I’m an artist. I’m a paid geek web professional who does design, SEO, and copywriting. I’m a nature enthusiast. I’m a science nut. I’m a musician. I’m a thoughtful spiritualist. I’m an animal-lover.

Above all, I’m a person, and restricting any home of mine, virtual or otherwise, to just one facet of myself is a sure recipe for stagnancy and decay. Which is pretty much what happened as winter turned to fall last year.

So, I’ve stopped trying to limit the topics of this blog. I can’t promise you I’ll never go quiet again, but I can promise to be more present and more responsive, for all our sakes. Getting my muse rolling again (she rides an old Honda that looks suspiciously like mine) may take a while, and there will surely be some shaky turns, but we’re on our way.

Come along for the ride, won’t you? If nothing else, it will be weird … interesting.

I was working on a brand spanking new website with so much stuff I can’t even list it all. There are sections for writing, geofiction, web design, and art. I’ve added a shiny about page and my contact information. I made a sitemap to keep everything straight. I moved all my creative generators over here. I found a plugin and got a Flickr account to share my photography and my awesome amateur art. I redesigned the whole blog layout to merge it seamlessly with the new site design, and I’m still in love with the header image.

Now that I have a website that I’m proud of, I’m back in the blogging business, and I’ll be talking more and more regularly.

You can count on it.

By the way, if you have any web design (or graphic design, search engine optimization, copywriting, etc) resources or any worldbuilding/geofiction links, drop me a line and an URL. And if you want your personal site linked to from my blog, let me know! Provided it’s creative in nature (photography, art, music, prose, poetry, etc) and well-kept, I’ll happily link to you.

Happy New Year, folks! Mine has just begun, and with it comes a recommitment to this blog and what it represents – my efforts at authorship.

My last post was over a month ago and talked about my need to unplug. Well, true to personal form, I hit one extreme after the other and completely abandoned Twitter, instant messaging, most of my email, and this blog in order to get myself together. I focused on things outside of the computer and things inside of my head. I worldbuilt a lot, even finishing the Gurhai starmap. I spent the holidays with J’s family for the first time, enjoyed it, and missed my own people in Colorado and West Virginia.

Now, the year has that just-unpackaged crisp smell to it, and I’m ready to return. While I can’t promise I will immediately swing back into my every-odd-day posting schedule, I will be guiding myself back in that direction and writing here more often. I’ve written out my goals (not resolutions) for the year, and being right here is one of them.It’s going to be a better year than the one we’ve left behind. May everyone have a wonderful 2010!

Image Credit: Crestock Creative Photos.

I am a private person. I have locked and filtered my livejournals in the past and used an alias to firmly separate my name from my online presence. I’m still taking measures to keep that alias separated from this online presence, although anyone with some Google-fu could figure me out fairly easily. (No, that is not an invitation, thank you very much. I’m still talkin’ here! Put the search engine down and step away slowly…)

I’m a marketer, among other things. I understand personal branding, which is why my alias is so hard to cleave cleanly. I’ve been online since 2000. My fiction and worldbuilding is spattered all over the place, cohesively branded as me and mine – but I don’t link that name to this one.

I’m a bit of a weird person. A freak, if you will. I’d rather not have my legal name associated with my personal quirks, especially when it comes to employers and coworkers wandering the internet and potentially discovering too much. (I’m not talking about anything illegal or sexual here, just so you know.) I am not mainstream when it comes to religion and spirituality, to interpersonal relationships and humanity, to worldview and philosophy, or to hobbies and interests. I am a perfectly functional adult who leads an awesome life and does some good for people, and I certainly don’t lie about who and what I am, but I also don’t blatantly advertise it in settings where people might not want to know that I have sworn by the Flying Spaghetti Monster before.

Starting this blog and taking the first step towards professional authordom is making that balancing act increasingly difficult. I’ve showed a coworker this site (she asked about conlangs!) and put this site’s design on my resume, so I have a vested interest in blending personality and professionalism. All the same, I refuse to not be me. I’m a writer, for godssakes, and my eccentricity and imagination are absolutely vital to any success I have in storytelling.

At this point in my life, I don’t think conformity is worth it for me. Certainly not here, as a fiction writer, and not really in the 9-5 workforce, either. I’ve come a long way, and I’m done apologizing for being my own person. I’m living my life my way, and I love it – and if I can serve as proof that it can be done, maybe more people will follow their hearts and put away the plastic masks so many of us wear. I’d rather be hated for what I am than loved for what I’m not, and I’m not afraid of whatever results my individualism earns.

This ain’t your mama’s fiction, kids, and I ain’t your typical author.

Image Credit: Royalty Free Images.

My name is A. I’m a writer and a self-published author of The Demon-God of Jubagh. This blog is going to chronicle my journey from writing-as-a-hobby to writing-as-a-path – maybe not a career path, but a path nonetheless. Over the next two years, I aim to finish at least four major writing projects (read: novels) and find an agent. Failing luck with an agent, I’m going to continue down the self-publishing path. I’m a marketer by day (among half a dozen other things), so I’m no stranger to getting the word out and making my name known.

Along the way, I’ll be blogging about a variety of things related to writing. Inspiration drawn from various sources, including real life and fiction; my particular writing methods and foibles; the creative worldbuilding process that I so love; and, of course, what I’m writing. You’ll find brainstorming, musing, exultation, flailing, excerpts, and shared experiences all contained within this little webspace.

As an introduction, let me give you an impression of where I’m coming from. I was born and raised in West Virginia, moved to Colorado for three years, and am currently meandering around in western Nevada. (I went from the Appalachian, to the Rockies, to the Sierra Nevada range. I’ll never live without mountains.) There are four cats and a dog in the household that I share with my love, J, as well as a houseplant, two motorcycles, and about fifty gazillion musical instruments. (Seriously. We have four guitars, six drums, a fiddle, a keyboard, a dozen harmonicas… need I continue?) J and I are both avid martial artists, animal-centric people, and deeply bound to the natural world around us – you’ll see these influences creep (or, really, lunge) into my writing and worldbuilding. I write sci-fantasy, occasionally wandering off my hybrid road into science fiction or high fantasy; I try to buck stereotypes and cliches as often as I twist them into something new. My day jobs normally involve graphic/web design, marketing, or customer service management. (Read: I like shiny things, and I speak kindly and politely to people.)

You can find me on Twitter under @authormancuso (amancuso was taken!) and right here on this blog. I also have personal worldbuilding wikis for the Gurhai universe (setting of the Jubagh series) and the Lavanaverse, as well as a wiki for Uhjayi, a language spoken by the inlanlu tahori of the Gurhai ‘verse.

The next two years hold incredible promises and adventures. This is only the first exhilerating step.

Let’s go!